Come Tuesday, Christina Galindo-Walsh will be hunkered down at a command center in Arlington, intent on ensuring that disabled voters get to the polls.
Advocacy groups have pushed for laws allowing greater access to the voting booth. They have traveled to rehabilitation centers and sheltered workshops to register voters. And they have lined up vans and volunteers in battleground states to transport the disabled Nov. 2.
Now, with the air thick with legal challenges, advocates are pooling their legal resources to ensure that those with mental and physical limitations are not blocked from voting.
Some groups "are targeting vulnerable communities," said Galindo-Walsh, a lawyer who works for the National Association of Protection Advocacy Systems, a network of state agencies overseeing the rights of the disabled. "Individuals with disabilities are especially vulnerable to challenges."
In Ohio, for instance, local Republican Party activists pledged last week to challenge mentally disabled voters not accompanied by a legal guardian.
"They are not going to block our vote," said Becky Ogle, a Democratic Party coordinator, as she left Bethesda for Ohio last week.
The disabled have long had low voter turnouts. But in what is expected to be an extraordinarily tight election, advocates are focused on getting as many of the nation's estimated 40 million voting-age disabled people to the polls as they can.
Since the 2000 election, advocacy groups have registered thousands of new voters. Now they are sending mailings, mobilizing phone banks and organizing van pools. Democratic and Republican leaders are targeting this huge subset of voters, which includes people with speech and hearing impairments, addictions, mental illness, blindness and quadriplegia.
As a bloc, the disabled have traditionally voted Democratic. An October Reuters/Zogby International poll found that likely disabled voters favored Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) over President Bush, 58 percent to 34 percent -- a split reminiscent of their margin of support for Democrat Al Gore in his 2000 race against Bush.
But Republicans are fighting to win over the disabled, as well. They have recruited more than 4,000 disabled "team leaders" across the country to go door-to-door, make phone calls and get voters to the polls, Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson said.
"We want to reach out to all voters," Iverson said, "including voters who haven't voted Republican in the past."
Democratic campaign coordinators in battleground states are equipped with telephone lists of thousands of rehabilitation centers they are targeting, said Ogle, who is the disability outreach coordinator for the Democratic National Committee.
"The Democratic Party -- as well as the Kerry-Edwards campaign -- is aggressively courting the disabled community," said Ogle, who has spina bifida.
Driving a handicapped-accessible van, Ogle was bound for Cuyahoga County, Ohio, to combat the possible legal challenge aimed at mentally disabled voters. The county's GOP chairman, Jim Trakas, initially said his observers would challenge anyone who was assisted by someone other than a legal guardian.
